


Flowers From Ashes

by Jenny_Islander



Series: She-Ra Stories I'm Not Writing [3]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:08:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25269619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenny_Islander/pseuds/Jenny_Islander
Summary: If any of these outlines or prompts inspires you, feel free to use it.Thumbnail: Prime thought he had destroyed the Horde clones' species and homeworld.
Series: She-Ra Stories I'm Not Writing [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1829491
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3





	1. Still Here

The home planet of Hordak's species is called Keero. A thousand years ago (or whatever timespan Prime has officially been rampaging around--if there is one), Keero had a patchwork of civilizations somewhat like the Marvel Universe, that is, mostly like the real world but some cultures also had super-science and/or cinematic magic. A research lab that specialized in magic-science hybridization was attempting to open a window into another universe to see what was there. The good news is that they succeeded. The bad news is that Prime came through it. He had been watching the experiments from the other side, and he was primed (heh) to begin his conquest.

The following century was...not good. At first nobody realized what was happening. The magical core of the planet was dwindling, and wars and industrial disasters were increasing, but the prime mover behind it all stayed hidden. When Prime finally stopped pretending to be a keeron (their name for their species), alliances were formed against him. But they couldn't take him down. All they could do was drive him off the planet, a direction he wanted to take anyway, since Keero had made first contact with visitors from other planets and Prime wanted all of those planets for himself. 

As a final act of spite against those who would dare to defy him and a demonstration of his power, Prime dropped a big space rock on Keero, just where it would produce a catastrophe almost as bad as the one that took out Earth's dinosaurs. He then surrounded Keero with killer space robots that would shoot down anybody who would try to rescue surviving keerons, and also shoot down any keerons who found a ship someplace and tried to escape.

Some keerons did survive, in shelters that had been designed for thermonuclear war. They emerged to a world that endured a planet-wide rain of fire, a year without a summer, mass dieoff and regrowth of forests and grasslands, and the extinction of every other kind of life that massed more than 10 kilos and most of the smaller ones too. They managed to rebuild their population, which now numbers almost a million, and refound civilization with material complexity comparable to the European Renaissance. They have to be careful with their use of magic because the magical core is still regenerating very slowly, and they are careful with their use of high-energy technology because they don't want to risk attracting Prime's attention by sending signals or creating heat signatures. (They don't realize that Prime never came back to Keero.) 

They did not lose their history: they know exactly what happened to their ancestors. Each one of them carries a knife around their neck that's just long enough to cut a throat. Nobody wants to become a host for Prime, should he ever return.

They have no idea that he's dead, or that salvagers and explorers have tried to land now and then and been blown up by the robots.


	2. Gender?  Is That a Kind of Omelet?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keerons are totally not human, and if Hordak ever finds his ancestral homeworld he's going to get some eye-openers.

Keerons don't have gender as such because every adult is capable of both gestation and insemination during a fertile period that lasts for many decades between childhood and elderhood. They do recognize that some people are, and/or used to be, and/or think that they will and/or would, gestate exclusively, while others are exclusively inseminators, still others don't care either way, and of course there are those who are not interested in reproduction at all. (As with humans, the reproductive drive and the sexual drive do not necessarily match.)

Before Impact Day, there were hundreds of keeron cultures. Generally speaking, keerons assumed that the four groups described above were biologically intrinsic (while arguing over the boundaries of those groups), but each culture imposed different expectations.

For example, one culture required that the firstborn be a gestator and the secondborn an inseminator, while the rest were allowed to make their own choices. People who had been assigned to the gestator or inseminator group at birth were dressed distinctively and addressed with specific pronouns. Each was expected to produce at least two biological children exclusively with a partner or partners who had been assigned the corresponding role at birth. If they could not, then any "spares" were expected to rearrange their lives to take up the duties, distinctive dress, and pronouns of firstborn or secondborn, even if they were repulsed by the whole business or had to leave families they had already formed. This was believed to create a more stable society.

Another regarded the physical changes that gestation imposes on keerons (breast growth, sleekness, a slower gait) as the height of beauty, so everyone who wanted to be seen as beautiful dressed in clothes that made them seem to be in the early stages of pregnancy. This culture also required that all children be raised by two adults who had made a long-term commitment to their care, whether or not they had a pair bond or any biological connection to the children. This was believed to improve emotional stability and decision-making capability in children. Parents who preferred to go it alone, or refused to get another partner after a divorce or bereavement, were seen as naive or selfish.

A third did not care about who did what in which arrangement or size of bonded or unbonded group, but cared very much about proper spacing of children and the ages of the biological parents, on the grounds of improved physical health for everyone involved.

And so on.

Present-day keerons, numbering about one million, live one bad harvest from starvation. They all live in smallish communities in the same region of the planet, and share one culture with many local variants. Generally speaking, they live in multi-generational households that care for members who can no longer work and take in fosterlings, friends, and romantic and/or sexual and/or parental partners from elsewhere. Households try to raise as many children as they can feed, because they have neither draft animals nor engines, so they need every pair of hands they can keep healthy. They also have very low genetic diversity, which makes reproduction of all fertile persons important. On the other hand, Prime's depredations instilled a long-lasting cultural aversion to forcing anybody to do anything. The compromise is that all individuals (except the "extra" members of a group of identical multiples) are expected to reproduce at least once in whatever way seems best to them, but are not expected to raise the child. In addition, nobody cares who raises whose children as long as somebody is raising each child, and as long as actual genetic relationships are tracked.


End file.
